Microsoft cancelling unique space battle game Galactic Reign in three days; servers offline by January

If there is one thing we don’t like about Microsoft it’s when they put an end to good ideas that seemingly didn’t get a fair chance.

Such is the case with Galactic Reign, the distinctive space-battle and strategy game that co-launched on Windows Phone and Windows 8 just a few months ago. The game allowed people to play online against other Xbox users and to continue the game on their phone or tablet, seamlessly. The game’s real unique feature was the custom rendering of space battles, giving users a new way to appreciate war.

Now in their support forums, Microsoft has announced that the game will no longer be available after August 15th, which is in just three days. The game’s online servers which power the system, will be taken offline December 31st.

Color us crushed.

The game, which costs $4.99 on Windows Phone and Windows 8 (though users only needed to purchase it once for cross-platform play), will evidently not be refunded unless you put up a fight with customer service.

But why?

Microsoft only gave the tersest non-answer to the question ‘Why?’ by stating:

“We continually explore new games and entertainment concepts. Galactic Reign was a great cloud-based video rendering game exploration that we are going to bring to a close.”

There are either two explanations for the change: the business model just did not work out (and not enough people were playing to justify the costs) or the game itself was a test-bed for newer technology (that you paid to be a part of). While the second answer probably has some truth in it, we suspect that it was simply not cost-efficient to run those servers with so few players.

In fact, as much as we love the game, we found ourselves often forgetting we had ongoing battles with other opponents. The game is turn-based, meaning games could go on for some time, especially if someone didn’t play their turn.

Even worse was Microsoft’s answer to the question will there be any future Galactic Reign games released? The answer is no, meaning this is the end of this unique experience.

We understand Microsoft has a business to run, but we can’t help but be upset at such a cancellation. The game has massive potential and had it gone to iOS and Android along with some actual promotion, could have potentially taken off bringing much needed attention to the mobile Xbox universe. The game has a high 4.5 Star rating in the Store from 366 reviews, but that number of reviews is quite low for an Xbox Live title.

Would it have been that difficult for them to integrate the AI into the game for the single player campaign at least, instead of having that portion "in the cloud"?
Maybe convert it to a freemium game to at least give it a chance at success?

This sucks, I bought it only some weeks ago! That's a pretty short lifetime for such an expensive app.. Guess rendering those videos cost them quite a lot of bandwith which makes it a relatively costly service in processing power as well as bandwith for a game.

I think a lot of people have incredibly unrealistic expectations about what it takes to host a server. This is not like hosting a dinky little website; it's a server running a customized implementation intended to handle heavy and constant loads. Monthly costs run in the thousands per month, to start. Those costs scale with load, although I suspect that was not an issue here.

Then there's all the custom software running to handle this game. That also is far from trivial, and I can't even imagine the upfront cost in development that environment. The important detail here is that Galactic Reign was built around that server-based environment. So this isn't something where you write a few lines of code, flip a switch and now have a neat little single-player game.

It's easy to trivalize all the work involved when you don't understand what's going on behind the scenes. That's not to say, however, that what's happened here is a good thing. First, you have to question the decision to go with a game that even required a central server. Secondly, it's frustrating that a company like Microsoft couldn't have footed the bill to keep the game going. Unfortunately, I suspect they had a pathetically tiny numbering in the hundreds, at best.

The more disheartening thing here is that it speaks to the state of gaming on Windows Phone. There isn't much variety or quality to be found and there's no good mechanism for promoting games.

I was never a fan of this game. Was so very simplistic. And it took a few minutes to generate a video of the result. You can't control the result, other than configuring the units and the class. So what. I wish it would have been somewhat realtime. Just to simple of a game and it wasn't fun IMO. Halo Spartan Assault, that's a different story and should be way more successful.

I have to say I loved playing this game but did wonder how it was financially viable for Microsoft.

For those saying they want money back... come on guys, you spend more when going to Starbucks. For a few months of fun, that was good value. Sad that the game will be going though.

Curious how the whole XBox One online servers will work given Microsoft's words about each console having many servers backing it up and that games can offload processing to those. Perhaps XBox Live membership will pay for that as it's an ongoing revenue stream.

So this game joins the rank of "Crackdown - Operation Sunburst": A nice gaming concept that simply gets abandoned.

After my experience with Crackdown (which got cancelled, delisted and shutdown less than 30 days after I purchased it without getting a refund) I knew why I skipped on a game that relies heavily on online mode. Unfortunatelly my fears have come true, though. I am sorry for everyone who purchased this game.

Its stories like this which will kill what little confidence I had in ms in the mobile gaming space. I bought it on surface and will likely be my last game as it is now the second game they have just abandoned that I bought (crackdown project sunburst being the other).
I thought the whole point of leveraging the azure stuff for xbox cloud was it did not take any resources when it had low usage so it should not have cost anything if nobody was playing and would spool up servers when needed. If we can't count on those games to be there why would anybody buy them going forward?

I must have at least 150 matches on this. Great game. It could have used a few more maps, a little more customization. I kept sending invites but the regular players had stopped playing completely. Eventually I stopped playing too.

I too play this game many times a day. It was not released on Xbox or iPhone or Andriod. How did they expect to get players in numbers to make the game sustainable let alone profitable? So disappointing. Seriously today was day to buy my Windows Phone. It would allow me to play GR on the go. Sadly the rug was pulled out from under it.

Dear Microsoft if you are going to sell access to a beta test please be upfront about it. Don't rope people unknowingly into a paid beta test and then suprise them a few months later in saying that it's over.

I truly wish for a time when Microsoft can bring a solid platform and stand behind it all the way. They had MSN Plus which included online storage of files and photos before even the term cloud was a technical jargon; then they discontnued it and lost me all my family photos from my siblings, nephews and nieces that were irreplaceable. Then they brought the service back when others smaller companies created a business model around the same principle. There was Spaces (pre-Facebook), it was very popular with MSN Messenger users around the globe. MS wasn't making money off of it and killed while introducing another similar service that never gained traction. Oh! And now, killing off MSN Messenger before Skype has all the features of the Windows Live Messenger it's replacing is forcing more and more folks to use apps like WhatsApp, Viber, etc..
Microsoft could have eaten up the costs of running that game and cross promoted during the XboxOne launch and Windows 8.1 release.

Its a great game and a perfect example if Xbox cross platform multiplayer. Maybe they should have given away a few free tokens as a promotion to get more gamers involved I dunno but I think its a great game that shouldn't be canceled

They should allow an azure service to run the game and then any game you start is run by your azure server for you and your friends. I would be cool with that for all of these games that have server parts that want to shut down.

Same here, waited and waited for the scenes to render. Sometimes a few minutes, sometimes 10 minutes or longer, or sometimes just hangs forever. If this is a test bed for future cloud-based games, doesn't the non-refund discourage future users from paying, since you don't know how long the game will keep working? Maybe offer paying users some store credit?

Not 100% sure on this but never seen this game in the store in Australia, really think all games should be available in all regions. also not impressed that we have to purchase these games twice once on the phone another on windows 8 or RT.
Hoping they can unify this soon. This is one area apple beats windows.

I hope and I pray that because of you brave souls who purchased said game, that the rest of us will be blessed with a full on multiplayer game with some of these features available, since you so freely invested in the development of this awesome technology and software. =D

A key point brought up is that this should have been ported to ios and android with marketing behind it. Take the game to gamescon with a tie-in with a popular SciFi character like Stargate. Let users pay to upgrade to unique weapons and ship classes.

This is a title that would've been one that excelled cross platform. Instead they will plead with an ios dev to bring their game to the platform and be behind on updates.

I disagree with the strategy of brining any Xbox-branded games to iOS or Android. I lay out my argument here, but the gist of it is that Xbox-branded games can be a huge selling point of Windows Phone and if they give up that exclusivity at all, they kill that leverage they have.
While I played Galactic Reign on Surface RT and didn't like it, I disagree with Microsoft's decision to shut it down. Sometimes you have to absorb some tiny costs in order to make the overall platform better. This was one of those cases. Instead, they've now left a sour taste in the mouths of everyone who bought this game (and even those who didn't, like me). Dumb move.

And leaving some virtual machines powered on costs them how much?
Versus the negative vibe/publicity. RIght now, in the mobile phone world, the last thing Microsoft need is negative publicity. Stupidos.

And that's what happens. There were no toast notifications (at least for me) unless you were in-game already, in which case it's completely pointless. I blame my forgetting about the games on that. The game itself had a good concept, however, and im sad since I spent $5 on it haha.

This is why I don't bother buying these kind of games, as companies can do what they like once they've got your money. The worst thing about this is people will have to jump through hoops, to 'try' get their money back -- this is terrible!

I really enjoyed the game when it came out, but as stated above, people would seem to forget they had a turn. I think most of my victories came from people who timed out. It's too bad, the game was very cool.

Playing doesn't cover the costs, it generates more costs actually. Purchasing the game covers costs, and that wouldn't happen untill the price was right. MS Studios could've saved this game by cutting the price, but instead they decided to brutally murder it. Did they even try at least putting it on sale for a week?

I really don't buy the server cost angle. I'm pretty sure MS Studios gets good deals on renting Azure servers, so the cost of running a simple service for a few users is minimal. Please notice that various freemium, $1 or even free multiplayer games do just fine, even though thousands of users keep plaing without paying.

I think it's just Microsoft being Microsoft - randomly doing weird shit with their products and services, and screwing over some customers to remind us how unstable of a vendor they are when on their period.

[Not speaking on behalf of my employer or any related entities. All views and opinions expressed are mine.]
Running things in Azure isn't free. There's overhead involved and capacity is expensive (not to mention regional concerns - sure there's capacity in SE Asia BUT... the ping time could be triple digits leading to a poor experience).
You can look at it as the left hand stealing from the right but that's really an internal control mechanism for making good business decisions. Purchasing a game doesn't BEGIN to cover the costs unless it becomes "Angry Birds" or something.
Look at the basic costs like this (and keep in mind this is just SE - sustained engineering - upkeep and patching NOT dev time or licensing an engine):
Devs - 90-100K (at least three but better to have at least five with any three being able to support the entire codebase)

Art - Same price but smaller studios, or projects, can hire on an ad-hoc basis and a smart artist will leave a "I can increase my bill rate whenever I want." clause and by getting creative with licensing. (50K+)
Sound - See above
Story - See above
HR/management - A dev's salary might break down to 50/hr but ultimately after benefits and overhead each head could REALLY cost 120/hr
Now add that up, and knowing that you could have 10,000 players.
Do the math.
There*s likely more to the story than that as it takes a LOT of work to get into MSG.
[BTW - MS is *THE* most stable vendor in the world for their Enterprise products. Just a bit of an FYI there.]

All your silly logic gets in the way of my skin deep thinking & my right to bitch & complain on the Internet like some anonymous toddler. I don't have to run their business P&L so why should I care about sustainability? And while we're whining, let's talk about the clear lack of innovation & risk Microsoft has demonstrated: One of these days, they're gonna take some big financial risks on some new ideas, like new types of cross-platform cloud gaming. Oh, and Microsoft doesn't give products a chance! How could they possibly see that NO ONE WAS PLAYING THE GAME AT ALL? It's not like they have, y'know, usage & sales trend reports or anything. When, oh, when will Microsoft spend billions of dollars on a product and really stick to it? WHEN I ASK YOU?!? /sarcasm

It's one of those tricky situations... Do you charge more for less customers, or less for more customers overall? I can't recall ever seeing GR on sale... They should've tried that to see if they get a rise in people playing which can often lead to even more customers coming onboard.

Liked this game a lot, just never really got into playing it on a regualr basis for fun. Purchased it both on Windows Phone and Windows 8, but like so many Xbox Live Windows Phone/8 titles, the online world is dead within a week. Literally, you wll not find a single player online at any time. Kind of a shame. I can see the reason for pulling this as mentioned in the article. The game is entirely online. It is not like it is even part of the experience.

Rats! I was about to buy this as it's just the sort of game I actually have time for (a bit of time scrounged here and there) and seemed to be a good robust game (not the usual phone-game that's as shallow as a rain puddle).
Are people really that worked up about $5?